Wednesday, March 22, 2017

The Building Age Story Map

I really like building age maps. Multi-colored building footprints nearly always make really beautiful looking maps. But building age maps don't just look good. They also have interesting stories to tell about where a city's oldest buildings still exist in the city's streets.

Most building age maps leave the users themselves to find these stories in the patterns of the colored building footprints on the city map. One way to improve a building age map therefore would be to pick out some of the implicit stories in the history of a city's buildings in the map itself. You could do this by creating a story map from a city's building age map.

This is exactly what CBC has done with their Montreal Building Age map. Using the Montreal is 375 years old, but how old are its buildings? interactive map you can view the age of all Montreal's buildings. However the map is also used to explore the architecture and history of thirty of Montreal's most emblematic buildings.

As you scroll through the Montreal Building Age story map CBC pick out some of Montreal's most interesting buildings on the city's map. The text panel is then used to show photos of the highlighted buildings and to explain each building's historical & architectural importance.

The result is that CBC's map is much more than just an aesthetically pleasing building age map of Montreal. It is also an interesting introduction to the history of Montreal itself and a guide to where you can still find that history on the city's streets.